Exactly.

1999-2003: 120fps=no problem on 100% of monitors, unlike in 2016, where it's just small fraction of monitors used by gamers worldwide, for most hardcore enthusiasts who are forced to pay 5-10x more than they should.

Force feedback wheel support in every game with cars = sure

3D: sure
Technology utilized as soon as possible: sure. 4.1, 5.1 etc. sound,

level of inconvenience, bugs fighing etc. - no worse than it is on current generation of consoles, especially with games being released in beta stage so often

- plenty of stuff that required a PC. Back then, there were no smartphones or laptops to do certain task. What once was a graphics station in big tower type of case, now can be done by a cheap tablet, laptop or even smartphone.

- CPU and GPU progress wasn't slowed down because the chip manufacturing process wasn't focused on gaming, but rather for maximum power saving feauters and the lowest energy draw.

and so on.

Industry took most of awesomeness out of PC gaming, and the biggest issue is that in normal times we had games to proove that shelling out money for a high-end graphics card was worth it. Now we don't even have PC ports. We have "something". Totally "zero effort" strategy :/
Not even as little as to sit and write a proper assets data streaming for PC with System RAM + GPU RAM architecture. Not even that. What could work on 8GB RAM requires 10 or 12GB. What should be OK with 2GB of GPU RAM, requires 4 or even more.
Then it gets even worse...
No games designed for PC CPUs faster than what 2007 PC could do (Xone/PS4 level).
No games designed for 16GB of RAM, and that it's almost 3x as much as PS4 has.
No games designed with SSDs in mind
No games designed for high-end GPUs and in just half a year from now, we'll have HBM 2 cards, which have 4x better bandwidth than PS4pro and 3x better than memory that will be used in Scorpio.
Not even games designed for "mouse control + 120Hz refresh". Not anymore. Who played Painkiller or Serious Sam (or Unreal Tournament, Tribes or Q3A, knows how awesome those games were and while this particular topic had witnessed a big improvement recently, twitch shooters designed for 120Hz+mouse gaming are nowhere near the position they once had. You cannot just port the game focused on one platform, to the other platform, and expect to be equally good. That's why console players didn't receive a port of Battlefield 2, but rather got a different game, with the same name, but completely re-imagined, so it's better on consoles.

Sure gamers aren't guilty, just corporations and not even that. Just assholes who have no idea about gaming market, but think that they know it best, because they're doing big money on it. They know how to make money, but they don't know what they got into and how badly they hurt gaming.
Insomiac for example. It was sad to read the interview in 2009, when they admitted that 60fps is better for the game and gamers, but 30fps is much easier to make the game profitable so they have to abandon 60fps in their games. And unfortunately they're sticking to it till this day.
In the past, many great gaming studios knew how to create great games, and new what true gamers expect and love.
Bizarre Creations. People Can Fly, Factor 5, Criterion Games, Codemasters, Free Radical Design, Rare.
There was passion. People creating games knew they are doing something which will bring lots of joy to many gamers. They were happy to help making other people's lives better, more pleasant, and that is a thing that really matters, even if it's just 10hrs per year, it still is valuable 10 hours of having fun. Having fun is one of the most important things in life. This was important. It was also fun, because healthy gaming market meant that innovations and progress were a natural piece of the landscape.
Now we had to wait 5 years since 2008 until anyone designed a game with more than 0,5-1GB of RAM in mind. PCs could handle many "next-gen" games back then, but nope. A few years later, in 2013, suddenly all devs started to praise the 5GB of available memory in Xone/PS4, saying that it allows things impossible before.
No shit Sherlock, noone who played modded Oblivion didn't knew that. Noone had 2GB of RAM in 2006. Noone had 4GB not much later.

Everything went worse since PS2 days :/
Mafia 3 doesn't even have a proper wheel support (Mafia 1 had a properly done wheel steering option), we get crap-ports which don't even run at stable 60fps on pretty expensive hardware (Skylake+gtx1070) despite the fact that the PC is like 3x faster than console for which the game was designed. Instead of getting HBM2 cards, we got GDDR5X card which additionally got 1200$ price. Yeah, cause that will help game devs to create games designed for high-end PCs...

And why Nvidia and Intel set their prices so high? Because they have a position close to a monopoly and because they think there are not that much gamers interested in such hardware anyway, so they want to milk that group that truly loves gaming, as much as possible. And why so little people would agree to spend extra for high-end cards? Because there are no games.
Companies fucked the market up and instead of saying "oh shit, we've fucked up" they say that it's just a matter of new generation of people who prefer to use smartphones and consoles than PCs.
Yeah, cause fangroup of Sport Cars wouldn't shrink if suddenly companies decide to limit the cars to 70KM/h speeds and made reverse the only gear that works.
Fucking survey-reading idiots who know the industry just from the money perspective. Those people who make decissions in big companies. Those are to blame for what happened to gaming industry. Noone else.

But on the other hand, gaming community has so many idiots nowadays, who will show aggression towards people who try to tell them how it is. They don't realize that "something's wrong" and they even see themselves as better persons, because the fact that they see nothing wrong has to prove that they know the "mysterious art of enjoying games" and whoever says even a word of criticism (often mistaken with complaining) surely isn't good enough to aquire this sacred knowledge of "how to enjoy games".
Yeah. For example I enjoyed sniper rifles and stealth mechanics. In MDK1 and PS2 MGS series. I somehow cannot be happy from the fact that this is 90% of gameplay nowadays. I can understand why other gamers can enjoy it, but the fact that I cannot enjoy the same thing for 20 years without getting bored, doesn't mean I just complain for the sake of complaining.
Internet is toxic in this matter. I saw a gamer on one gaming forum, who asked how to run Rayman Origins at 120Hz mode. People were entering the thread just to offend the guy, because "he's an idiot who complains". The poor guy just asked how can he switch the game so it could utilize the good of his monitor. He payed extra to have 120Hz, so he'd like to be able to use it wherever he wants to, that's logic, right?
Apparently not, to many gamers.
So gamers are guilty of that attitude, but the problems of the industry we have now, aren't originating from that, but rather from what big companies do.
And about those stupid gamers, just to be clear. I realize stupid console gamers and stupid PC gamers are just a fraction of all, therefore I forbid you getting offended by my comments here, just because you play on a given hardware ;) )